it that we, the incredulous sheep, see no signs following them that believe;—that though they can communicate the Holy Spirit, they cannot excommunicate the unholy one, and apologetically leave the healing of sick to the physician, the taking up of serpents to the juggler, and the moving of mountains to the railway-navvy? “It was never meant that any one should do such things literally, after St. Paul’s time.” Then what was meant, and what is, doctors mine? Challenge enough, for this time, it seems to me; the rather that just as I finish writing it, I receive a challenge myself, requiring attentive answer. Fors could not have brought it me at better time. The reader will find it the first in the Notes and Correspondence of this year; and my answer may both meet the doubts of many readers who would not so frankly have expressed them; and contain some definitions of principle which are necessary for our future work. My correspondent, referring to my complaint that no matron nor maid of England had yet joined the St. George’s Company, answers, for her own part, first that her husband and family prevent her from doing it; secondly, that she has done it already; thirdly, that she will do it when I do it myself. It is only to the third of these pleas that I at present reply. She tells me, first, that I have not joined the St. George’s Company because I have no home. It is too true. But that is because my father, and mother, and nurse, are dead; because the woman I hoped would have been my wife is dying; and because the place where I would fain have stayed to remember all of them, was rendered physically uninhabitable to me by the violence of my neighbours;—that is to say, by their destroying the fields I needed to think in, and the light I needed to work by. Nevertheless, I have, under these conditions, done the best thing possible to me—bought a piece of land on which I could live in peace; and on that land, wild when I bought it, have already made, not only one garden, but two, to match against my correspondent’s; nor that without help from children who, though not mine, have been cared for as if they were. Secondly; my correspondent tells me that my duty is to stay at home, instead of dating from places which are a dream of delight to her, and which, therefore, she concludes, must be a reality of delight to me.